Friend,

Today marks one year since a violent, white supremacist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to overthrow 2020’s fair and democratic presidential election.

Brandishing antisemitic and racist paraphernalia, the mob brutally attacked U.S. Capitol police officers—killing one—and sought to harm and kill elected officials. Black officers on the scene described feeling fear as groups of people hurled the n word at them.

One of those officers, Henry Dunn, said that “one of the scariest things about January 6th is that the people that were there, even to this day, think that they were right. They think that they were right. And that makes for a scary recipe for the future of this country.”

I agree, it is scary.

Recent polls have shown that nearly 80% of Republicans still believe the “Big Lie” that Biden did not win the election, and a majority of Republicans support the use of violence for political means.

Surveys have found that the millions of people who believe both of these things also believe racist conspiracy theories—based on false assumptions that non-white people get special privileges they have not earned.

Such folks don’t understand the very real and persistent racial wealth gap, which keeps growing and holds constant even when controlling for education level, income level, and more. Or the other myriad ways in which racism is systematized into our institutions.

Ever since building our country’s wealth while enslaved, Black Americans have not gotten an equitable share in the wealth they’ve created. Clearly, they’re not the people who are benefiting from generations of unearned privileges.

This is by design. For hundreds of years, white conservatives have been excluding Black Americans from our country’s electoral process and erecting other barriers to equality.

During and after the civil rights movement, conservative white Democrats moved to the Republican Party, which was becoming the party of resisting racial equality. Today, white supremacy is a mainstream feature of the Republican Party. And it’s clear that, like the Confederacy, the GOP cares more about maintaining unequal power than about our country or our democracy.

In order to maintain our unjust status quo and preserve a power structure designed to benefit white wealthy people at the expense of everyone else, right-wingers are actively seeking to destroy our system of multi-racial democracy. And this is increasingly mainstream.

A prominent political scientist has used the term “ethnic antagonism” to describe people’s misperceptions that Muslims, immigrants, Black people, and brown people have more than their fair share of political power and government resources. Through analyzing surveys, he has found that ethnic antagonism is the strongest factor most associated with anti-democratic sentiments among conservatives.

So it’s no coincidence that many of the January 6th insurrectionists came from U.S. counties that have lost the most white population in the United States.

Nor is it a coincidence that Trump and his supporters targeted Black and brown communities with their election fraud conspiracies, angry that communities of color voted out Trump.

Black and brown communities have always been the targets of voter suppression in this country.

And since January 6th, state legislators have introduced and passed bills to make it harder to vote (which will disproportionately impact Black and brown voters) and to make it easier for partisan legislatures to tamper with democratic elections and overturn the will of voters.

Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress have largely sided with Trump and the insurrectionists he incited.

They’ve tried to block voting rights along with investigations into the January 6th attack on the Capitol, they’ve used Islamophobic and racist attacks to threaten me and other progressive colleagues of color, and they’re stirring up an increasingly anti-democratic and openly racist base in order to win despite representing a minority of the American people.

As activist Bree Newsome Bass wrote:

“Conservatives are not just ‘attacking democracy’. It’s specifically about reinforcing structural racism and preventing freedom & full citizenship for Black Americans. …They have no issue with a democracy that is limited to white participation. They are becoming increasingly authoritarian because they recognize that is the only way to preserve white domination as the demographics shift.”

For too long, the idea that the United States belongs to white people, that white people are more deserving of power, has shaped our country’s politics. No more.

We have to claim this country as belonging to all of us. We must continue expanding the idea of who deserves rights and resources, as liberation movements before us have done.

I’m the proud daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and I was raised in Detroit: one of the most beautiful, Blackest cities in America, where movements for civil rights and social justice are birthed.

I want to reiterate: We all belong here. And we all deserve freedom, justice, human dignity, and the opportunity to thrive.

In solidarity,

Rashida