It has been almost two months since the Jan. 6 insurrection battle at the Capitol that left 8 dead and one very important question that will probably remain a mystery forever. How is it possible for a country that spends almost 1$ trillion in defense to be infiltrated by people armed with pepper spray and poles (assuming there were many firearms, but none were unholstered)? I propose that the one overarching theme to this solution is not simple but fairly easy to understand. Media has reported this theme with a code word for the last month, they call it “a lack of imagination.” This code is confusing since up to this point in the hearings, everybody had a very clear understanding that this group of people with a violent past had a very clear goal, to stop the House of Representatives from counting the votes. “A lack of imagination” is code for implicit racial bias. Nobody thought violence would happen from the streets up to the head of the FBI because they have been subconsciously been trained to believe that threats of this nature, i.e. terrorism came from people who don’t look like white guys that look like them.
Gorham explains the dissociation by the theory of the ultimate attribution error (p.15). People judge others by the groups they are in, either ingroups or outgroups. You can watch somebody perform an action and if you assumed they are ingroup, you make the lightest possible assumptions of why they are acting that way because you identify with them. Outgroups (or others) don’t get this kind of generous understanding since people are primed to assume the worst of people who are not like you. These thoughts are not conscious and the only way to fight them is to know that they exist.
The intelligence clearly had it pinned that these were bad people, they were also white people, so it was much easier to slant their understanding of the threat. This is implicit bias, they assumed their behavior but recalculated their motives based on association.
The simplest way to make this clear is to look at how the preparation for the protests by Black Lives Matter was handle by authorities. The scene at the Lincoln Memorial, which does not house any Congressmen or Senator it had 50 masked Nation Guardsman wearing camouflage behind a row of D.C. Police during the June 3, 2020 protests. That was the day that former President Trump ordered Lafayette Square to be cleared so he could have his photo taken with a bible at St. Johns Church. The protesters faced tear gas, rubber bullets, many were detained, 88 arrests were made.
It couldn’t be any more clear that even after a “successful” terrorist attack on our Capitol, only 52 arrests were made. I even remember watching officers helping women down the stairs and taking selfies with the aggressors. These crimes had clear motives, clear intents, and it is becoming more clear to me why nobody saw this coming.
Gorham, B. (2019) The social psychology of stereotypes and bias: implications for media audiences. In R.A. Lind (Fourth Edition.), Race/Gender/Class/Media. Routledge.