Michelle Obama poured out the contents of her soul regarding the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.
Obama, 56, was startled by the stark disparity between the way that Black Lives Matter protesters were treated in the summer of 2020 and White thugs were handled this week by Capitol police.
“In just a few hours, though, my heart had fallen harder and faster than I can remember,” she said, referring to the mob of domestic White terrorists who desecrated the Capitol building.
Scores of people on social media pointed out the way Colin Kaepernick peacefully knelt in 2016 as well as how others mostly peacefully protested in 2020 yet were pummeled with rubber bullets, tased, pepper-sprayed, arrested en masse and even shot by real bullets.
“This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an overwhelmingly peaceful movement — our nation’s largest demonstrations ever, bringing together people of every race and class and encouraging millions to re-examine their own assumptions and behavior,” she wrote in a lengthy post on Twitter. “And yet, in city after city, we saw peaceful protesters met with brute force. We saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, law enforcement pepper spraying its way through a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo op.”
Like all of you, I’ve been feeling so many emotions since yesterday. I tried to put my thoughts down here: pic.twitter.com/9xzRvrpk7y
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 7, 2021
The former first lady and all-time bestselling author of Becoming lauded the successful Senate campaigns of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia.
However, Obama said the country cannot move forward until it comes to terms with what transpired on Jan. 6 as well as what precipitated and who provoked it.
“I cannot think about moving on or turning the page until we reckon with the reality of what we saw yesterday,” she continued. “True progress will be possible only once we acknowledge that this disconnect exists and take steps to repair it.”
Take a look at Obama’s full open letter to Americans on the next page.
